Monday, February 4, 2008

OK, so maybe the title did not turn out to be as clever as I thought it would. What's happening is I am upgrading my development machine. I am switching from a Dell XPS 1710 to an HP dv9700t. The XPS has been wonderful, and has a videocard that absolutely rocks (GeForce Go 7900 GTX), but it is starting to age a bit on the CPU side (mine is one of the first ones, it only has a Core Duo 2GHz).

The new HP has a GeForce Go 8600M GS, which is not the top of the market as far as mobile nVidia chips go, but it's not too bad. It isn't as fast as the one in the Dell, but it does have several advantages:

- Shader model 4.0- DirectX 10- HDR- nVidia PureVideo- PowerMizer (to save power for using it on the go)

The new laptop also has a 2.5GHz, 6MB L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, which should be a nice upgrade for me. Like anything in life, this upgrade is a compromise. I lose some screen resolution (Dell's screen runs at an awe-inspiring 1900x1200), but gain a bit in weight (I do normally take my dev machine with me in my travels), and catch up with times in many different areas.

The best part is I am probably going to be even Steven once it is all done, for I got a great $500 off coupon for the HP. Thanks Slickdeals.

I will shortly post some benchmark comparisons of TowerSim once I put these two machines face-to-face.

3
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hey, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate this work your doing. I'm a keen user of BAO's tower and would love to see a new generation tower sim. Hope all goes well, and I will keep checking up!!Sam.